All articles with 'line charts' Tag

Line charts in Excel are essential for trend analysis, spotting distribution and outliers. Use these 6 variations to get more out your line chart.

• Indexed Line Chart
• Sparklines
• Spaghetti Line Chart
• Smoothed Line Chart
• Forecast Line Chart
• Line Chart Combinations

Let’s learn how to create a color changing line chart using Excel. This is what we will create.

Looks interesting? Read on.

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In the 36th session of Chandoo.org podcast, Let’s follow the trend.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• A quick trip to down under
• What is trend analysis
• 4 types of common trends
  • linear
  • curve
  • cyclical
  • strange
• Doing trend analysis in Excel – the process
• How to use trend analysis results
• Conclusions

Situation: Our commissions are growing way faster than revenues
Let’s say you are looking revenues & sales commissions of your company for last few years. The data looks like this:

And you want to highlight the fact that commissions are growing faster than revenues.

So you plot YoY growth rates for revenues & commissions.

Problem: The chart of YoY growth rates is not convincing

Take a look at the chart. It doesn’t convey the message that we want. At best it says “revenue growth is less than commission growth”

How to convey the message “Commission growth is a problem for us”?

Imagine you are the in-charge of finance department at Hogwarts. So one fine day, while you are practicing the spells, Dumbledore walks in to your office and says, “Our electricity bills are way too high. As the muggles don’t accept wizard money, we have to find a way to reduce our power consumption.”

So you summoned the previous 12 month utility bills to examine energy consumption patterns, and pretty soon you realized that most of the electricity consumption is due to the light bulbs. You suddenly have a brilliant idea. Why not replace the light bulbs with a variety that consumes low power? A light bulb moment indeed.

Your next step is to figure out what varieties of light bulbs are out there. Fortunately this is easier than catching a snitch in a game of quidditch. A quick search revealed that there are 3 types of light bulbs:

• Regular incandescent bulbs (the kind Hogwarts currently uses)
• Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFL)
• Light Emitting Diode bulbs (LED)

Now your job is to do a cost benefit analysis of these options and pick one.

Here is an interesting scenario.

Imagine you are responsible for customer satisfaction at ACME Inc. Every month you track customer satisfaction rate for the 3 products you sell which are conveniently named Product A, B & C.

You also have bands for the satisfaction rating.

• Rating of 85% or below is Average
• Rating between 85% & 95% is OK
• Rating above 95% is good

At the end of the year, you want to visualize the ratings for last 12 months for 3 products along with bands.

Something like above.

Unfortunately, there is no “Insert Banded line chart” button in Excel. So what to do?

That is what we will learn today. Ready?

Today, lets talk about indexing, a technique used to compare changes in values over time.

What is indexing?
Lets say you want to compare prices of Gold & Coffee over last few years. Gold price in 2011 (oct) is $1,655 per ounce. And now (sept 2012) it is $1,744. Like wise, Silver price in 2011 is $32.06 and in 2012 it is $33.61. How do we compare such diverse numbers?

Enter indexing.

First we need to calculate price of Gold and Silver in 2012 assuming their starting price is 100. This can be done with simple arithmetic.

Now, we can easily compare the prices. Looking at the indexed prices, we can conclude that both Gold & Silver prices have gone up by similar percentage (~5%).

Today, lets learn how to create small-multiples (or panel charts) to visualize trend of 2 product lines over years in various regions. The inspiration for this chart and article came from my friend, Paresh‘s recent article on his blog.

See how you can create a combination of area & line chart to create the small-multiple chart and clone it. You can also download the workbook and play with it to understand this technique better.

In the final post of the Are You Trendy? series we will look at the use of Excel Charts and associated Trendlines for trend analysis and I will give you a free tool (Normally valued at $200, I wish) which will allow interactive assessment of a Charts Trendline Y value for any X value.

The FIFA World-cup 2010 edition is around the corner. Like millions of people around the world, I too am an ardent fan of football. (although, I have played only one game of soccer in which I waited near opponents goal post as I was too lazy to run around. And when my team mates kicked […]

In part 2 of Excel Dynamic Dashboard Tutorial, we will learn how to set up various dynamic charts that are part of the dashboard. We start with a simple dynamic pie chart that shows the sales distributions and then move on to sales trend line charts. These charts use various excel formulas to pull in the information based on user selection.

Sparkline or Microchart is a tiny little chart that you can place on dashboards, reports or presentations to provide rich visualization without loosing much space. In excel 2010, MS introduced a beautiful feature for creating sparklines from data in spreadsheets. For earlier versions of Excel (that is 2007 and before) there is no native support […]

Last week I have reviewed Google’s flu trends chart and told you that is it is very well made. Out of curiosity I made a similar chart in Excel. In this post, I am going to share the experience and results with you. Interested? Read on…

There is nothing awesome about flu. In fact, it is anti-awesome if you have flu. I have been fortunate enough not to get it ever (it is another story that I have cold almost 364 days of an year).

Don’t worry if you are afraid of it, Folks at Google are not letting you down. They are using google search terms to predict flu trends and present the information in a beautiful chart.

Today I want to tell you why this particular chart on flu trends made by Google is awesome…

Sales reports and dashboards are very common in any company. There are several ways in which you can visualize sales data to understand the trends and sales performance. So in November, I have asked you to visualize sales data using sample data. The visualization challenge #2, sponsored by Zoho Reports generated a huge buzz around the community and fetched 32 incredible entries. The response was so overwhelming that it took me almost 24 hours to write this post. Thanks everyone for participating and making this a huge learning experience for everyone. Personally I have learned several useful dashboard and charting tricks. I will be sharing some of these lessons with all of you in the coming weeks.